France: Pulling out early from Afghanistan

“It’s clear to everyone that it’s time to leave Afghanistan,” said Jean-Dominique Merchet in the Paris Marianne. Of the 82 French troops who have died in the Afghan conflict, more than half were killed in the past two years. That shows that after 10 years of warfare, the situation on the ground has been getting worse, not better. Last month’s murder of four unarmed French soldiers by an Afghan soldier, ostensibly their ally, was simply the last straw. A frustrated President Nicolas Sarkozy “banged his fist on the table” and announced the immediate suspension of training and an early withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan. The drawdown has already begun, and the last French soldiers will now depart in 2013. As one top French official put it, “To win would be good. But to leave would be better.”

The acceleration of the withdrawal is “mostly symbolic,” said Isabelle Lasserre in Le Figaro. Sarkozy struck a compromise between the 2014 deadline set by NATO and the immediate retreat demanded by François Hollande, his Socialist Party opponent in the upcoming presidential contest. It’s a matter of a few months—enough to placate the irate French public, but not so drastic as to harm our military relationship with the United States. After long boycotting NATO’s military council, France rejoined it in 2009, and it does not want to “jeopardize the confidence of the Americans and British that it worked so hard to regain.” The lesson of Spain looms large: The Spanish abruptly abandoned Iraq in 2004 and “have yet to regain the respect” of NATO or the United States.

Whether the French contingent stays or goes is beside the point, said Serge Michailof in Le Monde. Afghanistan will not be secure by 2014 either way. George W. Bush made a hash of the war early on, when he got bored with it, refused to commit resources to Afghan civil society, and turned instead to Iraq. It was only with “the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House” that a “fairly coherent overall strategy” was adopted. Great gains have been made through Obama’s troop surge, but they are not enough to ensure that the Afghans can control their own affairs. The police are still extremely corrupt, and the government depends on international aid for almost its whole budget. Once the West tires of throwing money at Afghanistan, there are two possible futures: the return of the Taliban “or the return of civil war.”

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And yet we cannot say that we have failed, said Laurent Marchand in the Rennes Ouest-France. “Absolute security is an illusory concept.” Afghanistan has been at war with itself for decades, and it was always unlikely that the West would be able to remake it entirely. Judged by access to health care and education, “the Afghan civilian population has benefited” from Western intervention. Eight million children are now in school, up from 1 million in 2001. Some 80 percent of the population has access to medical care. Our efforts, then, “were not in vain.”